Kent from Kohima lit up the internet with his delightfully wacky food videos this grim year
After the horrors of 2020, slide into the new year with a smile
Affluent Indians spent inordinately long periods of time in their kitchens this year, going by their Instagram feeds. Forced to stay at home and with oodles of time to kill, they made croquets and quiches and all sorts of difficult-to-pronounce, foreign-sounding things
But Kent from Kohima went vocal about local – quite literally – in his vlogs. Not just with his choice of recipes, but also with the process of consumption (hint: no spoons here). And he did not just cook, he sourced all that went into his food himself. He ventured out to the lush green Naga countryside (shirtless and barefoot), trapped crabs with rotten eggs and caught tadpoles with mosquito nets. In his most viral video yet – 2.5 million views at last count – he picked snails out of the marsh with his hands as if he were plucking grass and then cooked up a storm in a maize broth.
Delectable as the food looked, what really caught my imagination was how he devoured what he cooked: “Naga style”, with his hands, slurping loudly. In a world that seemed to have become so joyless, Kent kept the spirits high and reminded us that happiness often lay in the simplest of things – like eating shirtless out in the open with your hands, making loud slurpy noises.